Guus Bosman

software engineering director


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Books & literature

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The Moon Is Down

I read this while sitting on the porch in Hot Springs, VA while drinking a glass of merlot. Fantastic book, obviously, it being a Steinbeck. The edition I have here didn't have a summary or even a tagline so I didn't know anything about the book. With Steinbeck, that doesn't matter.

John Steinbeck
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Leo & Adrian completed Veilig Leren Lezen

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Leo & Adrian completed Veilig Leren Lezen, a Dutch reading curriculum for first grade. Today they received their official diploma; they really completed the work several months ago.

When the boys were little, I was thinking that it might be hard to get the Dutch reading skills to the same level as Nora. I spent quite a lot of time with Nora and with 3 kids instead of 1, it would be hard to give that same attention to the boys, I figured. The pandemic changed that equation dramatically of course and since March 2020 we have done extensive Veilig Leren Lezen exercises, most days of the week, and the result is there.

Both boys read Dutch very well and read books well above their grade level. Adrian loves reading about history ("De weg naar Titicaca" was one of his recent reads), Leo enjoys the Dolfje Weerwolfje series.

I'm really proud of them, a great achievement.

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Get Well Soon

A lovely short book about the impact of various diseases and epidemics on human development. I like how the author is opiniated and her style is funny. "That was a monstrous thing to do", she wrote at some point. Enjoyable book on a sad subject.

It was published just before the discovery of Covid-19 which makes it all the more pungent. She actually wrote about "get really worried if you see people dying of pneumonia" -- and that's of course exactly what happened.

Jennifer Wright
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books

The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner: And Other Stories

Nora read her first Terry Pratchett book; she finished it on Halloween today. I'm a proud father.

The book is _The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner: And Other Stories_, a collection of short stories Pratchett wrote when he was still a teenager.

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Complete Works

Plato's Complete Works! What a beautiful challenge. I would have never thought I would actually read all these works by Plato. This became one of my ever favorite books, both in its contents and the awesomeness of reading dialogues and good discussions from more than 2,500 years ago.

Plato
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American travels of a Dutch hobo

While I keep struggling through the last Plato books, I keep distracting myself with lighter fare. I recently read this memoir of a Dutch retiree who remember his three years as an alien in the US during the 1920s, when he jump ship in the harbor of NYC.

I liked reading this book. It was nostalgic at times. The author, an old man in the 1980s, was pondering how his life could have been if he had stayed in the US, maybe married one of the women he met. It made me really curious about his live after he was expelled from the US, back to Holland.

Gerard Leeflang
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America give me a chance!

I'm still slogging through the complete works of Plato and it is getting boring. So I read "America give me a chance!", a hundred-year old book by a Dutch immigrant, Edward W. Bok. I didn't know much about him at all, but this is an interesting auto-biography. Edward met so many famous people in his life time, including several Presidents. His life work was editing a lady journal, and he's a gifted author.

Edward W. Bok
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Works and Days

This was a short book. The poem is around 800 lines only, though the book has an excellent introduction by A.E. Stallings. She is funny and made Hesiod approachable, both in her translation and the background she gave.

It's nice to think that Hesiod might have been the one introducing the Muses to Greek mythology; he dedicated the tripod he won for a previous work to a local shrine for them.

Hesiod
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Republic

This was the first time I read a book by Plato. Throughout the years I've read about his ideas, about Forms and the Allegory of the Cave, but I'd never read his actual work -- I was always intimidated! Well, now I'm on my Gutenberg reading spree, he was next in line. It turns out that Republic was quite readable, in a good translation and with great introductions by Melissane Lane in the Penguin Classics series.

Plato
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The Clouds

Part of the reading list from Gutenberg was a play by Aristophanes, The Clouds. It's a short play, and I read it in an hour or two, but I don't think I'll immediately read more plays -- I didn't love The Clouds. Unlike the case of Aschylus, where one story (and a book being unavailable right away in the library, haha), encouraged me to read the whole series.

I think what bothered me most was the conservative outlook by Aristophanes, making fun of Socrates and others who were trying to learn more. Even though that's 2,500 years ago, it made me annoyed with the guy; it's like watching Fox News I suppose.

The language was beautiful and very rich. I read Paul Roche's translation which is very contemporary and uses modern cursewords and so forth -- that was a bit shocking but felt right, in the sense that the original play must have been quite jarring and shocking as well.

Update 2/10: Now I've read some works about Socrates, I don't feel so bad about Aristophanes making fun of him anymore. So while taking a break after reading The Republic, I read Acharnians -- a funny story about a guy making a private peace-treaty with Sparta, and the outcome of that.

Update 2/17: You know, I'm starting to appreciate Aristophanes more and more and when I saw that Plato's Symposium is partially model after Frogs, I read that. Frogs is quite entertaining.

It's amazing how all these books refer to each other. Symposium to Frogs, Frogs to Aeschylus (who I really enjoyed), Frogs to Homer and Hesiod.. It's really nice to read all of these in the same time period, to get a full view. In Frogs there is a competition between Aeschylus and Euripides to figure out in the after-life who was the best poet. I have to say Roche's introductions and footnotes are quite good, too. Roche mentions that Sophocles had just passed away when Frogs was written, and Aristophanes didn't have time to make Sophocles a full participant in the verbal combat, though he did weave him into the story-line.

Aristophanes
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